


Sunchild

by OxfordOctopus



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: (that's important), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asexual Character, Asexual Kara Danvers, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Kara Danvers isn't Supergirl, Kid Fic, Light Angst, Supercorptober 2020, Teen Pregnancy, but she's still an alien, i guess?, it's just that like, she's still an alien, so she never becomes Supergirl, the bad stuff in season 1 never happened? kinda?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:21:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26993581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Kara Danvers and Sam Arias meet at a single mothers’ support group.
Relationships: Kara Danvers & Lena Luthor, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor, Samantha "Sam" Arias & Kara Danvers
Comments: 12
Kudos: 296





	Sunchild

It is both the overwhelming need to be normal, to live up to her late stepfather’s desire to see her be accepted and integrated into human society, and the unrelenting peer pressure that _this is just part of growing up_ , that sex is something teenagers just _did_ and wanted - even if she doesn’t - that gets her to give in. To just let her boyfriend sweep her under, makes her brush the discomfort swimming in her belly aside as _just nerves_.

She doesn’t end up enjoying it. But she does it, and that’s really all that matters, in the end.

* * *

Liam breaks up with her the day after, and she overhears him talking about her being a ‘dead lay’, a fish. Alex is at university on the other side of the planet, too far away to defend her anymore, gone like the wind. It still hurts, expecting to turn to find her adoptive sister and finding only empty air, a vacuum in the place where her support network used to be.

The rumours that follow—they’re _distracting_. That’s the only word for it, because they’re _just_ rumours. It seems like a 50/50 split about whether or not people even believe Liam in the first place, and those who do—well, they don’t seem to want to talk about the freaky girl they all knew from middle school, too-quiet and accompanied by rumours about a violent sister. There are too many bad memories caught up in it, she is somehow at the same time the topic nobody wants to talk about _and_ the topic everyone is talking about.

It’s distracting enough that she doesn’t realize she’s missed her monthly period until it’s three weeks in.

At first, she just doesn’t believe it. Hybrid aliens aren’t impossible, but they are uncommon, and Kryptonians aren’t fertile even if you’re generous. The birthing chambers were built for that reason, a combination of environmental collapse and nutrient scarcity leaving many without the ability to give birth or make someone pregnant. Rao, Kara didn’t even _have_ her period before she arrived on Earth, soaked in the golden rays of its sun and it had been an entire freak-out, suddenly bleeding from private places like that.

Three weeks become four, then five, and then comes six, and with it, acute morning sickness.

The thing is, Kara does not _get_ sick. People puking is generally attributed to flu, viruses, diseases and pathogens, or eating the wrong thing, whether rotten or just too much of something your body just barely tolerates. Food poisoning was a thing, but much more common was just getting sick because you ate too much garlic without fully realizing it.

Kara’s body is made sturdier, impossibly more powerful. Her caloric intake is huge, and she can eat and eat and eat without ever suffering from stomach issues. She cannot get sick, there is quite literally nothing on this planet even _remotely_ powerful enough to get past her supercharged immune system. She does not get sick, not as she had on Krypton, where her childhood had been more of a long list of childhood illnesses.

In other words, the taste of bile is an utterly _new_ experience, especially with the differences in food on this planet, and is it any real wonder that she couldn’t keep herself from crying between heaves, that she was loud enough that Eliza came rushing up the stairs at 6 in the morning to find her, hunched over the toilet, giving up the last day’s worth of food in miserable lurches?

She tries to hide it, tries to pretend the days ticking by since her last period grow louder and more deafening in her head, each new day without what was until then a regularly _despised_ occurrence - considering, again, medication didn’t work on her, and her heavy flow wasn’t exactly fun - and attempts to play it off to Eliza as just eating the wrong thing, before back-tracking and explaining she’s obviously just sick. It’ll go away.

Eliza doesn’t believe a word of it, she can tell.

It isn’t going away, either, and it’s only noontime when her nausea crawls back down into the pit of her stomach like a reluctant beast returning to its den, promising to venture out at the same time tomorrow. It’s one in the morning when Eliza makes some sort of excuse to go to the store - something about soup to help her feel better - and Kara numbly nods along, the weight of everything beginning to settle in, horror taking up the little bundle in the back of her mouth where the nausea used to be.

It’s two-thirty when Eliza returns and wordlessly hands her a small red plastic cup, tells her to pee in it.

It’s three when she does, and when Eliza vanishes into the maze of personal lab equipment with that piece of plastic, Kara perching on the end of the couch, trying to focus on Degrassi and barely processing any of it.

It’s five-thirty when Eliza comes back out and firmly - if _gently_ , like she’s afraid Kara might break, that she might crumple into a ball of misery and pique - asks if she’s been sexually active in the last one-to-three months.

* * *

There’s a lot of crying, from both sides. Eliza is furious with her for being so reckless, Kara is torn between wanting and hating what’s inside of her. It’s a mess, she pukes again, right into the sink as the anxiety overcomes her like a wave and forces the toast she’d eaten out in slurred gags.

Words are spoken, and most of them Kara doesn’t truly process. She’s had a lot of time to think about what it meant that Kal— _Clark_ grew up without her; grew up wholly _human_ , with a thick, foreign accent to his mother tongue and a preference for homely farming estates in rural America. She doesn’t want to force that on her child, for it to become some sort of twisted _replacement_ for what she couldn’t do for Kal. She won’t let it, even if it hurts to give the child the opportunity to learn, to not force them to be what Kal couldn’t.

There’s other aspects too. Hybrid aliens are rare for another reason, and she has to explain that to Eliza, to the woman who studies xenobiology with a passion, that while the chances are higher for her, that Kryptonians and Humans _look_ mostly alike, a lot of hybrid children don’t make it fully to term, and the chance of that happening widens the more different any two alien species are. There’s risks, many of them, a worrying number.

There’s a hundred different reasons for Kara to get rid of the child. It’s a horrible thought to her, yes, to snuff out another chance at family, but there’s so many risks. So many precautions, so many things they’ll have to do here, they’ll have to do with only Eliza as a guidance. She’s ardently pro-choice, she has a _right_ to her body, she was raised on Krypton and there children were either happy accidents between sexually active couples - such as Kal’s parents, and was that ever a shock - or they’re _planned_. Nobody gets a child unprepared, nobody ever has to choose between a child and food or house or home.

There’s hundreds of reasons for why this is all a bad idea, for why this could even kill _her_. For why doing any of this is risking so much for something that might not be meant to be.

Tearily, shakily, with Eliza’s arms thrown around her in a hug, still coming down from the anxiety attack and the puking and everything, Kara presses her face into Eliza’s shoulder, takes in the smell that she’s slowly started to come to associate with ‘home’, Krypton’s scents beginning to fade like weathered paint in her mind. She breathes in, lets it out, and tells Eliza she wants to keep it.

* * *

They call Clark. It’s not something they can keep from him, any help he can give is wanted.

To say he’s unimpressed would be an understatement. Where Eliza, after a point, might understand Kara’s desire to keep it, might be able to parse the stumbling sentences as she goes over what led her to that moment in the first place, the unenthusiastic exploration of her teenage sexuality, Clark is another matter altogether.

He is never more human than he is then. He might accept that she can be sexually active, he isn’t so prudish to believe in marriage before sex, but he is viscerally uncomfortable with the notion of her having sex. She can see it, hear it in his heart. He’s significantly less accepting about her decision to keep it, citing an endless list of reasons why she shouldn’t. She’s too young, she’s too immature, she has her life ahead of her.

They’re things he says in his attempt to help her. She knows that. He’s saying these not because he doesn’t want her to have a child, but rather the impact that child will have on _her_. On her health. On her future.

It still hurts, and her hormones, never something she has had a perfect grasp on, are not responsive to the hurt. She shuts down for a while, skips a week of school and tortures herself mentally over it. It all comes back to how she never raised Kal, how different he is from her, from her family— _his_ family. It feels like rot, like the first few weeks she stumbled through the steps of living on Earth, adjusting with and without Clark’s presence, trying to learn how to function with knowledge that the duty handed down to her was not just complete, but complete without her, and nearly ten years in the past.

It brings her back, for a while, to the nightmares of the Phantom Zone. To the unsteady crawl of not-consciousness that she can vaguely remember on the fringes of her memory. It’s less of an awareness, she was not _awake_ in there, but there’s something material enough about the time she spent in the Phantom Zone that she can sort of feel the gap of time it represents. The twenty-something years she spent in there dwarf the years she’s lived by no insignificant amount, and sometimes that feels _heavy_ , like the walls are going to close in on her.

Still, she recovers. She has to, she’s decided to take this to term and she can’t just do this. She goes to Eliza after all that moping, asks her to help her finish her last year of school at home. Clark helps draft some documents, has friends in high places who he gets a false identity prepped for. Liam will not be her child’s father, nobody will be; if anyone goes looking, it will be a boy who died not long after the conception in a car-crash.

There is no room for human error.

* * *

The months following are... tough. Clark apologizes, and that’s nice—though the fact that Lois had to rip into him to get that far still stings. The nausea does not abate, if anything it gets worse. It’s not just _morning sickness_ anymore, it’s getting-sick-in-the-morning followed by day-long periods of exhausted nausea and upset stomachs and all the things she thought she escaped with Krypton’s destruction. It’s bittersweet, sometimes she wakes up expecting her mother to be hovering over her, fretting as she comes down from the latest in a long line of high fevers and recurring illnesses.

She finishes school at her own pace without having to pretend. There’s some suspicion, but evidence enough is given and she graduates high school six months earlier than expected. She’ll never set another foot in Midvale High, and she hopes her child won’t either.

Eliza manages to scrounge together something of a team. Everything is anonymous, even her own identity, double-blind by virtue of the fact that nobody there is sure if _she’s_ the alien or if her partner was. Correspondence between her and the small group of biologists and OBGYNs are filtered through Eliza’s own conversations. Most of it is, thankfully, handled online—emails, skype chats, shared documents, and everything is stamped and buried beneath enough NDAs to ruin everyone’s career if even something small slips.

She is not to be a science experiment, though she feels like one sometimes.

As far as the team - including Eliza - can tell the pregnancy is going well. Slow, but well. She wakes up one morning to find a bump along her stomach, and isn’t quite sure if it just appeared overnight or if this is just the point where it’s grown big enough to actually be visible, to catch the light to cast shadows.

The nausea abates and the cravings start, though Kara would take the cravings over anything else.

* * *

Alex arrives home early. If Eliza was disappointed, Clark unimpressed, Alex is _irate_. The shouting begins almost immediately, at her, at Eliza, and some of it is warranted. A lot of hurtful things are thrown around, _attention-grabbing behaviour, stupid,_ that sort of thing. Words Alex will regret, words Alex mumbles hoarse, broken-up apologies for not a few days later, but it’s... it’s still too much. Too loud. Too much stress.

She can’t handle Eliza and Alex’s dynamic, the push to look after her, to cast away Alex’s dreams for her own. She can’t handle the way Eliza implies it’s Alex’s fault they’re here in the first place. She can’t handle how it crushes Alex to hear those words, can’t stand to see the sight of her face twisting up into knots.

It’s like swimming in acid. The air is always tense, always caustic, ready to worsen, to melt away the thin veneer of calm that builds between each outburst. Sometimes it’s Alex who starts it, more often it’s Eliza, whose duties surrounding the progression of her pregnancy have seemingly finally caught up with her and is struggling not to burn out.

Kara sees a lot, knows a lot. She’s not dense, even if she likes to pretend she is, if only to avoid people calling her mature or emotionally aware. She knows this is tearing the family apart, piece-by-piece, slow and steady, but it is. She knows the signs of exhaustion, she lives them some days.

So she does something stupid. Something inopportune.

She leaves.

* * *

Clark and Lois host her for the remainder of her pregnancy, taking time off work. They empathize, Lois especially, who struggled deeply under her father, who could empathize as the source of conflict. They all head back to Smallville for the rest of it, carefully tended to with a mixture of emails from Eliza and regular visits to one of Martha’s - Clark’s adoptive mother - close friends who know about Clark and is willing to do regular check-ups.

It would be wrong to say she _bonds_ with Clark, or Martha, or even really Lois, but the distance between them, born of different upbringings, it shrinks. She grows more pregnant, Clark grows more doting, more afraid, and so does Lois. They care for her like she didn’t just put her fist through a wall when her little baby kicks for the first time. Like she isn’t as strong as Clark at 17-going-on-18 than he is in his prime adulthood.

She doesn’t learn the gender, doesn’t want to, and spends a lot of time alternating between doing rudimentary studying for university and looking up baby names. She decides on a few, ones as close to Kryptonian counterparts and with thematic names, falls in love with all of the potential names, can’t bring herself to definitively choose one over the other.

It feels like an imminent dilemma as she grows larger and the baby inside of her grows more restless, little inside tantrums that make her queasy with both happiness and actual physical discomfort. It’s an odd dichotomy, that mix, but she copes.

Her baby, however, does not wait for anyone.

* * *

Cyra Kara Danvers - name meaning _sun_ in Persian, and being vocally identical to a common name used among girls when she was on Krypton - is born half-a-month premature in the dead of August. She’s tiny, and loud, with lungs that belch out an endless wail of confusion. She’s squirmy limbs, with unseeing glassy eyes and a crown of fluffy blonde hair. Her face is blotchy and red, and seemingly perpetually scrunched up in distaste.

She is born after four hours of labour, each of them excruciating and uncomfortable. The discomfort she’s felt throughout her entire pregnancy spikes to 11 when her water breaks at the breakfast table, and it suddenly clicks that she’s not entirely comfortable with the idea of something living inside of her. At all. It’s a bit of a weird thing to realize, mid-pregnancy, and something that should probably make her feel guilty that the only thought in her head is _never again_ , broken up occasionally by _Cyra-El_ , what with Cyra not having a proper father to append a last name to, such as she had with _Zor_ -El.

It’s really only the huge surge of adrenaline that keeps her from dwelling on the thoughts too much. Once Cyra’s out of her, it’s all floaty thoughts and hard-to-remained focus, with her baby tucked against her chest, whimpering but quieting as time goes on. Martha’s friend runs a few checks on her bottom parts to ensure nothing’s gone horrible off, and when it’s clear that it hasn’t - and there’s a muttered _Kryptonians_ tossed in there by Lois - they bundle up and head off to get Cyra formally registered.

It’s utterly surreal. Kara barely remembers any of it, other than that the lady at the counter was very nice and Martha had to guide her through writing the name in English instead of _Kryptahniuo_. She still does it, still stares utterly bewildered at the little slip of paper reading Cyra’s name, a birth certificate, born in _Kansas_ of all places. Smallville.

She laughs until she cries when she realizes that, technically, she’s now got to raise a _second_ small-town Kryptonian. She can’t even explain it to anyone, despite their worried glances.

* * *

Kara returns home to Midvale, to Eliza and hugs and her own room with a nursery set up. Alex leaves not long after seeing Cyra, something in her settled, calm. Something between Eliza and Alex has, if not been repaired, then has shifted. Returned to something less caustic and less ready to explode at a moment’s notice.

Watching Cyra grow is an utterly indescribable experience. Her loud lungs never abate, but soon they begin to alternate between being a way to announce her displeasure and to babble thoughtless little noises at her. The baby-fine blonde hair falls out, to be replaced by less frail blonde hair.

Kara takes up part-time coursework at the local university, working for a bachelor’s in marketing. It’s slow going, Cyra is always her number 1 priority, she’s there to see all of it. The first time she crawls, messily, stumbling over her limbs, just to come closer to her, spread out on the playmat, is almost a _religious_ experience. She hasn’t been religious since Krypton, couldn’t bring herself to carry over practices of worshipping Rao, what with most of them necessitating facing Him and that being very difficult when Rao wasn’t visible without using her enhanced sight or a telescope.

Cyra’s first word is “no!” - which sets a trend, Kara likes to think - and her first step is tremblingly done in front of Alex, Eliza and herself over Thanksgiving nearly a year after her birth. Her gummy smiles make up her entire world, but her entire world can’t be Midvale. There’s... too much here, even after everything else. She plans it with Eliza and Alex this time, shows them the scores she has at Stanhope and confesses her desire to go to Metropolis University.

Eliza frets, so does Alex. Cyra is thankfully unaware of the turmoil, and in the end it’s enough that Clark and Lois are around to get her adoptive family to give their blessings to the plan.

She trades one school and one state for another.

* * *

The first time she meets Samantha Arias is an accident.

It’s been a rough year at the university. Between juggling a part-time job at a Starbucks and taking care of a _very_ troublesome two-year-old - when the urge overcame Cyra, anyway; Kara has no idea where she got her mischief-making from - and going to university her days tend to blend one into the other. It’s a wonder that she’s keeping her scores up at all, especially considering her focus of study isn’t one which she has near-encyclopedic knowledge on from her education in Krypton.

Metropolis University blessedly has a daycare center, and Cyra is just barely old enough to fit in. Kara staggers her classes to ensure she has the most time with Cyra as possible, especially long stretches of uninterrupted time, and there’s only been a few slip-ups when Cyra has switched to _Kryptahniuo_ for certain objects she doesn’t know in English. It’s not difficult to play the language off as some sort of niche dialect from the caucuses, and nobody bats an eye after that.

Still, not everything is perfect, and Kara runs late one day. Not the first time, no, but Cyra has a temper when it comes to ‘mommy time’ and tends to get squirmy and while she has yet to develop powers the very last thing Kara wants is to find her toddler gouging out the ceiling with eye-beams.

Thankfully, instead of that, she rams right into someone like an utter moron. _Someone with a kid_ , even. She folds herself under the woman as best she can without making it look like she’s abusing her flight for it - hiding her powers was one thing, but if anyone thought she was going to take care of her kid _without_ super speed, they were in for a very rough surprise - and lands. Hard. She can hear the sound her head makes as it bonks against the ground. It doesn’t hurt, but it _sounds_ like it does, and apparently that’s all that matters.

Her kid, looking at most maybe 5 years, going on 6 or 7, immediately bursts into tears because of the sound. The woman scrambles to her feet, a horrified look on her face.

Kara smiles sheepishly up at her, perfectly unwounded, and spends the next ten minutes talking with the woman - who introduces herself as Samantha Arias - and explaining that she just has a _really_ durable head and she’s perfectly fine. It takes honest effort to work her down from calling an ambulance, even after showing her that there’s no bump, no crack in her skull, she’s perfectly fine.

By the end of it, Samantha - _call me Sam_ \- shoves a piece of card stock in her hand with an address and a group name - Single Mothers United - and tells her to, for the love of god, _please come_.

She’s, instead of ten, more like _thirty minutes_ late for Cyra that day and boy does her daughter _ever_ show her displeasure on that.

* * *

Single Mothers United, SMU, lovingly verbalized as a ‘suh-mu’ by the people who went there, was not a big group. It was just meant as a place to talk about the struggles of being a single mother, about finding people to relate to. There’s maybe ten people there, and about as many in kids, who get to hang out in a reserved play room full of soft, foamy toys that Cyra latches onto with wild abandon, not quite able to give up her teething habits even halfway to three years old.

The group is a blessing. There’s not a whole lot Kara is really able to _relate_ to other people with. It’s not that she doesn’t try, you know? She does. She wanted desperately to fit in and be normal and to just live up to Jeremiah’s expectations but she never quite managed it. She was always a bit removed, and the fact that she had a kid more or less cut off her social life from high school. There’s no gradual transformation from unpopular dweeb to average student, there, she’s too busy to pay much of a mind to it.

But here, here people understand. They talk a lot. She learns much more about Sam than she thought she would, learns about her adoptive mother and being forced out of the house. Kara talks about her own experiences, the fights at home, feeling foreign and out of place, how she’d finished school from home. Similar stories, reflections of one-another. Sam talks about her business, and talks about how Luthor Corp is steadily attempting to forcefully merge with it. How she might lose her only source of income, after working so hard.

Her and Sam’s experiences are close, very close. They share numbers, and even if Kara’s university work drags her away from the group more often than it lets her be there, Sam is always there to talk. Their talks are more complaining at first, Luthor Corp finishing up the merger, Sam ready to jump ship, but as Kara works and Cyra grows and things _move_ , the tone changes. Sam talks about Lena Luthor - _the sister of the man who keeps trying to kill her cousin, would kill her and Cyra in an instant if he knew_ \- and how she seems to be genuinely trying to include Sam, how she’s promising stability for her child.

Kara is wary, says as much. She never comes outright and says she’s an alien, but she toes the line frequently enough that she’s pretty sure Sam _knows_. Her caution is rewarded with understanding, but firm rejection, as time goes on. Lena worms her way into Sam’s life and Kara all but lives out the remaining few years at Metropolis U. vicariously living through her. It changes her, little-by-little, so slow she doesn’t even really notice it until Eliza brings up how happy she is, how much confidence she’s gained.

Friendship is one hell of a drug, she supposes.

Cyra changes too, grows into the first inklings of who she might be as a person. Thin blonde hair grows out into dense, thick wavy locks that Kara keeps cut short. Glassy eyes as an infant are traded out for gray, a colour she took from her biological father. Freckles begin to explode across her body at the first sign of sunlight, and she’s absolutely thick with them, adding quality and texture to her features. Her smiles are no longer gummy, all full teeth and broad, copying how Kara knows she smiles, just with more force.

Her personality blooms, mischievous and clever and all the things Kara loves to see. She’s a little _too_ clever, much too smug for her own good, but it’s worth it. She’s not got the pride Kara had at her age, but she knows how to talk her way into snacks and treats. She’s naturally active, athletic, running circles around the other kids, though the verdict’s still out on whether or not that’s the Kryptonian genes or just her being Cyra. She is, additionally, a late and deep sleeper, her nightly wakes petering off at around 2 years old to the continued jealousy of Eliza, who had struggled to keep Alex asleep from birth until well into her pre-teens, quick to learn, loves the colour pink, wants to one day ride a dinosaur, and can become capricious and lazy on command, flopping over into a bundle of loose limbs and lazy, lidded eyes.

She’s everything Kara could’ve wanted, everything Kara loves in her life and watching her grow is something she can never top.

* * *

“Auntie Alex!” Cyra booms, voice a high chirp, and flings herself out of the car, fluffy boots stomping through the snow and right up to Alex’s leg.

Alex looks better, Kara notices as she eases herself free of her car, hauling her and Cyra’s overnight stuff with her. She doesn’t have that ring of misery around her, doesn’t seem a half-step removed from reality and waiting for the chance to reach for a bottle again. It was part of the reason why Cyra hadn’t seen Alex nearly as much as Eliza, well that and Alex’s own stubborn refusal to leave National City for any length of time over the last couple of years.

Alex huffs as she tugs Cyra up from the snow, easing her up onto her hip with a fluidity Kara knows she lacks. “Heya sunshine,” Alex coos, reaching out with her free arm to brush tender fingers over Cyra’s ever-messy mop of blonde hair, getting a quick shake of protest out of the girl in response. “You’re bigger! You used to be half this size!”

“No way!” Cyra protests, sounding Very Offended by the idea that she could be something so droll as _small_ , leaning forward with no small amount of force to duck her face into Alex’s chest, smooshing her cheek against the material of her jacket.

“Yes way!”

Kara lets them banter, makes her way up the snowy driveway, easily bringing their things along with her. She makes sure the car’s locked - being robbed once does that to you, not that she was there to witness someone steal Cyra’s last car seat - with a press of a button and resigns herself to scraping the snow off tomorrow, considering the heavy, bleak overcast skies above them. Metropolis and Midvale share most of the weather, but Midvale’s just a little more wet due to its proximity to the ocean.

“So, how old are you now?” Alex asks, despite knowing, still toying with Cyra’s hair.

“Four!” Cyra squeals, muffled by the material of her jacket, and then launches into a truly lengthy description of her birthday with ‘Rubes’ and ‘Miss Sammy’ and the rest of the kids at the daycare center and—oh, can’t forget about the cake, there was lots of cake and—

“Hey, Kar,” Alex greets, timid.

Kara lets herself soften, really looks at this new Alex with her new purpose, not smelling like a boozy outhouse nor leaving her long-winded, teary drunk messages about how awful she’d been to her when she was pregnant. How scared she was that Kara was ruining her life.

“Hey, Alex.”

* * *

“So, you’re graduating from MU this year?”

Kara pauses, turkey dangling haphazardly next to her mouth. She glances up at Eliza, who is clearly not going to wait for her to savour her gravy-smothered poultry. “Yeah,” she admits, finally.

“Three years for a bachelor’s program is pretty impressive, Kar,” Alex mumbles, brows furrowed as she continues to try to wipe Cyra’s face free of turkey-speckled gravy, to little effect, considering Cyra was being about as cooperative as she normally was when it came to anything relating to being clean.

“Cyra will be five,” Eliza starts, slow, cautious. She knows Kara, she knows her temperament, and she’s being careful. That’s never a good sign. “What are you thinking about, school-wise?”

Ah. There’s the shoe. “I’m... not sure, yet? I still live near campus, I’ll have to move. I’ll look into the neighborhoods, see if there’s anything in my budget range?”

“Why don’t you move back home?” Eliza offers, as Kara expected.

Kara breathes out. She likes Midvale, but she likes it as an _adult_. Midvale is a source of... not trauma, perhaps, but something close. Cyra’s conception—it was a mistake, the girl herself is perfect and she would never, not even consider, giving her away for the chance to reclaim that one awkward, uncomfortable night, but she’s self aware enough to realize it, and only within the context of her increasing awareness that she doesn’t really like sex as a concept. Midvale is only safe now because she’s an adult, she has agency, she’s not a 17 year old teenager sobbing into a toilet bowl trying to avoid reality.

She can’t bring Cyra back to here, back to those memories. She opens her mouth, prepares to plead her case against a stubborn woman who is looking at things as _grandma_ and cares so-so much and—

“Why not National City?”

Everyone at the table turns to look at Alex. Kara does, Cyra does, blinking owlishly up at her from her place on Alex’s lap. Eliza looks affronted, then almost thoughtful.

“Look, Kar, I know you like to pretend that nobody can notice it, but.” Alex pauses, shovels another forkful of turkey into Cyra’s mouth dutifully, Cyra making all of those happy, pleased noises she does when she eats something she likes, smacking her lips. “But you’re clearly uncomfortable here.”

“ _Alex_ ,” Eliza tries to chastise, but—

“No,” Kara interrupts, sets her voice firmly. Heads turn to her, next, Cyra staring ignorantly up at her, as happy as she has ever been with a mouth full of food. “No, Alex’s right. I... have a lot of baggage here. I’m sorry, Eliza, but... I’ll try to find something in Metropolis, Clark should have some ideas—”

“I said National City not to just bring the topic up, you know that?” Alex cuts in, sounding almost... offended. “I have an apartment, it’s... not a whole lot, but it’s really cheap and in the inner city. I can grandfather you in, since I’m moving anyway. It’s near a nice school, and I’ll always be around to help if you need it.”

Kara opens her mouth, shuts it. She’ll have to think, she had already been scoping out potential locations to rent. Still, it’s worth asking. “How cheap?”

Alex names a number that is barely half of her budget for rent, and shows her pictures of a place that looks like it should be twice her _total_ budget at the least.

* * *

Sam gets her into one last meeting at the SMU. People say their goodbyes when she explains that she’s moving, and one even hands her a small book full of numbers to similar groups in National City. There aren’t as many as Metropolis, but then Metropolis is really big in comparison, so it’s no loss.

Sam hugs her. For a long time. It’s both awkward and endearing and despite the two of them slowly pulling apart because of Sam’s new duties at Luthor Corp and Kara’s own workload, it feels good. Ruby, Sam’s daughter, cries a little into her pants, but it’s no big deal, especially because Cyra tickles her and brings the two of them down into a shouty playful brawl that messes up Cyra’s combed hair and Ruby comes out of it trying to bite Cyra’s sleeve off and it’s just—

A lot.

But not unwanted.

“You always have my number,” Sam tells her gravely, hands on either shoulder. “I will be there as soon as I can, within reason, or help you. You’re one of my best friends, Cyra’s basically a second daughter. I don’t care if you think it’ll impact my daily life, Lena won’t kill me for it.”

Kara smiles, wobbly and wet and fails when she tries not to cry.

* * *

Adapting to National City is a slow process. Kara has lived in various environments in her life, but never... _this_. On Krypton, climate-controlled environments had been the norm, even in the outdoors. Weather fields were projected from boxes all around Argo to create an invisible bubble of hospitable living space. Midvale was a ways out from Metropolis, but in the same area, with wet seasonal weather, and her stint in Kansas had not been long enough to let her decide if the weather was just because it was the summer or if it was because it was like that in general.

California does not pretend to be anything but what it is. Rolling grasslands, dried and almost sharp to the touch, with cacti and dust and endless rows of concrete. It does not rain, it does not get wet; the winter season is _warmer_ than summer was in Midvale, and the summer itself is only survivable due to the fact that she’s a Kryptonian.

Cyra gets some of it. Kara’s pretty sure these are the early signs of her powers, in that she’s nowhere near as impacted by the sudden lurch in temperature as she should be. She sweats less than she should, she doesn’t drink much more than she did before, she’s not entirely impacted by it. Of course, that isn’t to say she doesn’t _complain_ , no Cyra gets very fussy about how everything is coloured ‘orange-brown’ and is ‘dry like ieiu’s turkey’ but the novelty of a new city wins her over, however slowly.

The school Cyra ends up going to is local, barely a few minutes walk from the apartment, all with safe sidewalk passages and a tight neighbourhood watch to make sure kids come and go as they should. Her teacher is Mrs. McKelly, a plump woman with a bright smile and nothing but praises for Cyra.

For all that Cyra’s situation is properly packed away, Kara’s is significantly less so. Job hunting is difficult, especially without a good ‘in’ for the industry, but her savings - not exactly meagre, considering she’s gone to university on a full scholarship and she’s been working part-time for a long time at this point, but not exactly _huge_ \- will get her through the next six months until emergency measures are necessary.

This is, however, not how her brain works. The fact that there is a future where she _could_ run out of money and have to stagger back to Midvale is enough of an impetus to get her to do something equally stupid to the time she flew, several months pregnant, from Midvale to Metropolis to beg her cousin to take her in.

If Noonan’s - a local coffee place - won’t hire her, then what’s the risk in throwing out a job application to be Cat Grant’s - yes, _that_ Cat Grant - personal assistant?

* * *

Kara is willing to blame being nervous for what she did. She wasn’t expecting to actually be interviewed, and she was somewhat put on the spot for it. Cat Grant is an intimidating woman and she’s really bad around intimidating women and it’s all she can do to fumble her way through the interview, subtly using her powers without a thought just to prove herself worth it.

She wants and she absolutely _does not want_ to be Cat Grant’s assistant. It’s a mixed bag. But something just compels her to try her hardest to win her over and—

“Are you willing to sacrifice everything in your life to be my assistant?” Cat Grant asks, and Kara almost agrees.

Almost.

Her lips thin, purse. “I can’t.” It’s the truth.

Cat Grant raises an eyebrow. “Then why should I hire you?”

It’s a challenge. Kara thinks that maybe her response was unexpected, unpredicted. “I have a child, Cyra,” Kara begins, slowly. “She’s five, at school right now.”

Something in Cat’s face twitches, shifts her expression around. She’s quiet, letting her continue, letting her _talk_ when most of what Cat had been doing was bowling over her with the sheer force of her personality.

“I can get a job elsewhere,” Kara concedes simply. “I... know that. I think I can do good here, but I can’t promise all of me. My daughter comes first, she always will, and this job would be really helpful. The pay’s good, the hours, well, I can work with them. I think it will give me good experience into, well, the field I studied. I want to do this job, it’s something I think I would enjoy doing as work, but my daughter will _always_ come first.”

Cat just hums.

“I can’t give you everything, but I can give you all that I can.”

Cat Grant, media mogul, all around _terrifying woman_ and force of nature, cants her eyes up to look at her. Really look at her, look into her soul like she might be able to read her mind. She tilts her head, almost like her namesake, and purses her lips.

For a moment, there’s just silence.

Then, she opens her mouth.

Kara gets the job.

* * *

Working for Cat is another adjustment, but a good one. Following orders to the best of her ability is something that comes naturally to her. It’s something she was raised on, not with the Danvers, but on Krypton. Following orders was a core tenant of being a child of a house like El, doing tasks as told, being very precise. Being servile as she was to Cat—well, perhaps not, but the translation isn’t so muddy that it’s not easy to fall back into a similar headspace to how she learned as a child.

It’s very polarizing to find herself excelling under Cat. They’re not mentor and protege, not even close, but the pay’s nearly double what was on the advertisement for the position and it quickly becomes clear that Cat _is_ teaching her things. It takes a while, but as the early weeks slip into months and it becomes clear Kara isn’t going anywhere despite Cat’s revolving door of assistants in the past, she begins to learn.

It feels wrong to be so good at taking care of someone’s needs, at being reduced to something like this. It wars against that very same headspace she’s in to excel so feverishly in the high-energy environment of being Cat Grant’s assistant. The training they gave her as a child was training to _lead_. She was the first in line for succession for the house, though perhaps Kal, had he shown great strides, could’ve contested it. She was the eldest, possibly among some of the very few children the House of El would have permission to bear, and she had been trained for it. She might have ended up gravitating towards the Science Guild, but she had been trained with leadership in mind nevertheless.

Unlike before, though, unlike in her blurry memories of university, it isn’t wearing her down. She’s not crashing towards a burn-out; if anything she’s rapidly accelerating towards progress. The hours are tough, the tasks are brutal, she’s forced to learn the ins and outs of office politics in a _week_ to make headway into her job, but she learns and improves and gets better and soon enough she realizes she wants to stay at this job. Wants to wrap it around herself like a protective blanket. Cat Grant’s assistant, a role to help people, but not one that requires her be anymore than she can be.

Then Cyra gets sick.

* * *

“It’s the onset of her powers,” Eliza explains, smoothing fingers over Cyra’s sweat-dappled forehead. Her daughter squirms, uncomfortable, her fever pressing against every part of her skin, turning her a red Kara could only remember seeing back when she was born and wailing like the world was going to end.

“What ones?” Kara asks, whisper-quiet.

Eliza shrugs helplessly, looking tired. “I... I don’t _know_ , Kara. Super strength, at least, possibly flight? Durability, too, needles can’t pierce her skin anymore if she’s in direct sunlight. Her body’s struggling with holding onto it right now, but I think it’s adjusting. My best guess? She’ll have weaker powers than you, but she’ll get them all.”

Cyra’s only five, not even quite six yet. Kara was thirteen when she got her powers, old enough to be aware of her surroundings in a way a feverish five year old wasn’t.

“ _Ieiu_ ,” Cyra whines, pained, uncomfortable. Kara reaches forward, presses her hand into Cyra’s face, resists the urge to break something when she sees her daughter squirm and kick and plead for her again beneath her breath, barely conscious.

“Will it take longer for her to adapt to her powers?” She asks quietly.

Eliza shrugs again. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, honey.”

She... she has to do something. Her phone calls to her in memory, the number on it, Sam. They talked not too long ago, right before Cyra came down, but she’s been too busy to talk to her now.

She’s moving over towards the phone before she knows what she’s doing, tapping to Sam’s contact, bringing up the texts. She ignores Eliza’s questions, and once again, puts her complete and utter faith in Sam for the second time in her life. Lex Luthor might not be in jail, but he’s a criminal in Kara’s eyes, a very smart criminal, with a very smart family. He hates Kryptonians, hates Clark and would hate Kara and Cyra too.

 _Would you trust Lena Luthor with Ruby’s life?_ She sends.

It takes Sam five minutes to respond with _absolutely. what’s wrong?_

* * *

Lena Luthor is a woman of striking contrast, even in person. It’s dulled down to an edge, but there’s something pitted deep inside of Lena, something that _cares_ so much, that cares about others, that just wants to help. It reminds Kara of herself somewhat, reminds her of how Cat’s waiting for her return after Cyra stabilizes and how she’s putting a lot on the line.

Sam is beside her, smiling gently.

“You must be Kara?” Lena asks slowly, cautiously. Like she’s treading on glass and doesn’t want to press down to hard, lest it break.

They already agreed to tell Lena outright about Kara’s origin, prefacing it with that before anything else. A Luthor knows her identity.

Kara breathes in, out. Reminds herself she’d do next to anything to make sure Cyra didn’t have to spend a year punching holes in things, reminds herself that Cyra is in pain and they need more hands on deck to figure out the full extent of her changes. They need help, more help than Eliza can offer as a xenobiologist.

She steps forward, reaches out. Lena takes her hand in a shake.

“Kara Zor-El,” she replies quietly, enough that anyone nearby couldn’t overhear. “But yes, I am also Kara Danvers. My daughter’s just inside, if you’ll follow me?”

* * *

Cyra’s fever takes another five days to plateau and then dip back down, finally giving her up. Cyra regains her cognitive functions beyond mumbling pleas and being able to eat things directed into her mouth after another two.

Lena and Kara are both there for all of it.

Lena is somehow the support pillar in all of this. Kara should be, she’s the mother, the one who should be sturdy and calm and all the things she was raised to be. But she isn’t, because even though Lena diagnosed that the fever would abate without further issue not a few hours after introducing herself to a thoroughly bewildered Eliza, it still kills her to watch Cyra like this.

Lena catches her a few days into the stay crying into a corner and actually _hugs_ her. Lena Luthor, awkward and shy and so serious, goes out of her way to let Kara get snot and tears all over her pretty floral blouse, even when she’s busy working on some technology they’d pitched around as potential tools for Cyra to use when she came into her powers. Lena soothes her, Lena _cares_ , and Lena is clearly deeply affectionate towards Cyra, cares so much.

In the end, though, the fever leaving is less of a relief and more of a prelude to something worse. It becomes clear almost immediately that Cyra’s powers are different in some ways. Her hearing outpaces both Kara and Clark’s by magnitudes, it’s so acute she spends the first day clutching her head and wailing, unable to stop hearing the sound of gunfire up near Russia. Her sight is different, too, it can’t see perfectly through things, and has less intensity, but can instead pick up on infrared radiation, letting her see heat. It unnerves Cyra something fierce, the colours are upsetting, and the worst part is that Cyra apparently can’t describe them because she’s not seeing a computer monitor reflecting visible spectrum colours of infrared radiation, she’s _seeing the infrared wavelength_ and there’s no real comparison for the visible spectrum of light.

She’s got the strength, flight and durability, too, all which come into stark relief when Cyra shatters one of her soother toys and loses herself in grief. Kara flies out to get her a new one after calming her down, but she breaks other things, too, things that need to be replaced, and are willingly so. But it hurts Cyra, Kara knows, she can see it, the way each new accident dents her previously bright and happy demeanor, each new fault she finds in herself.

It’s crushing her.

Lena keeps her afloat. Sam returns back to Metropolis a week into the stay, citing her need to work, but Lena explains away any concerns with a “my family is so wealthy I do not need to work” when Kara asks about her own job. Eliza has to leave, too, but promises to be back in a month for another few months. Her and Lena have grown into something of a cordial relationship, as much as Eliza can manage, though she clearly thinks she’s been a bit usurped.

It’s becoming incredibly clear why Lena is all Sam could talk about. _Lena Lena Lena_ , it’s all Kara can even _think_ about anymore, even if Lena’s only there during the day, even if Alex doesn’t trust her, even if Cyra struggles around her because Lena is _new_ but also very close and Cyra might be adaptable but only so far.

Kara isn’t really sure when the feelings start. It’s somewhere between the time Lena makes Cyra a pair of lead-lined over-ear things that look a bit like a hearing aid, ones that make it so that Cyra’s hearing is now perfectly human and she no longer wakes up at night to the sound of military violence continents away. Maybe it’s around the time that Lena folds to Cyra’s impetuous demand - now that she’s regained some of her footing, now that the world isn’t so overwhelming - that she get glasses “just like _ieiu_ ” and gets her exactly that: big-framed, lead-lined glasses that keep her from seeing infrared light that she still isn’t really totally okay with seeing all the time.

At some point, though, she catches feelings. A lot of them. She has felt little-to-nothing for _anyone_ for a very long time, at least not romantically. Sam is like a sister, Alex is her sister, Eliza her adoptive mother, Cyra her child. People tried to date her in school, sure, and the ones who she went along with all bailed after they met Cyra, and she was better for it. But this is new, and newness is scary.

* * *

The rest of the powers are things Kara has to train Cyra into using. She takes to it quickly, thank god, she’s running out of sick leave and Cat’s patience can only go so far. Lena hypothesizes the difference between Cyra’s week or two of physical training to get her strength in check and Kara’s near _three months_ comes down to a matter of her being raised under the sun in the first place, and likely having strength which had grown beyond what was possible for someone her age slowly, before spiking as it did as the rest of her powers came into effect.

Lena explains a lot of things, really. Even when she doesn’t need to. She explains away Kara’s concerns about Cyra’s altered powers with a long conversation on metagenic effects in alien hybrids and altered gene expression and a bunch of words Kara _almost_ knows but is mostly there to hear her talk. She talks about her own job, her brother, the troubles her brother brings to her doorstep with his fixation on Superman.

Kara talks about Krypton, about Cyra’s conception, about how she feels about other people. She talks about her job and the sense of fulfillment she gained from being able to _help_.

There’s something deeply kindred there, something Kara can barely keep herself away from. It’s a lot like how it was with Sam, similar backgrounds drawn from different branches, different roots. Kara got to keep her adoptive family, Sam didn’t, but the beats are the same. Lena feels similar in that way, but distanced by a stage. She talks about the coldness of the Luthor household, the beacon that was her brother, the way it has dimmed under his obsession, overwhelmed by the shadow of his vitriol.

Lena talks about the fact that she, mostly out of spite, slept with an alien at MIT the day after her brother blew her off to try to kill Superman again.

But Lena also doesn’t ask a lot of things. She doesn’t ask who Superman is, she doesn’t ask about the house of El - despite Kara telling her about the symbol, how it’s not an ‘S’ for ‘Super’ or anything - she doesn’t ask about Cyra’s powers, she doesn’t experiment. She doesn’t ask about Krypton’s technology or tries to eke details out, she steps back and accepts what Kara is willing to give her.

It’s trust. It’s respect. It’s agency. It’s everything Kara ever wanted to be treated with.

Kara gets back to work, with slightly diminished hours. People congratulate her on her child making it through the illness, and Cat not-so-subtly demands details.

Lena remains. The reason why comes out later, a week after she starts working. Lena is fiddling with some of her own work, having set up the laptop in Kara’s living room, the couch hers to sleep in. Kara’s room is made up of two beds, one for Cyra, one for herself. It’s a small space, but one she loves, and the area is good.

“I don’t want to go back to Luthor Corp,” she says, not looking up from her laptop.

Kara pauses, nearly screwing up her attempt to flip a burger over. Grease spits on her arm, it doesn’t hurt, but it singes the sleeve of one of her better shirts and she almost curses.

Cyra giggles.

“If you were curious about why I’m not going back,” Lena clarified, oh-so-slow, words like honey. “I can leave whenever you want. Move out, go back, but... my brother—we don’t see eye-to-eye anymore.”

A pause.

“I’m terrified he’s about to do something awful, and I can’t bring myself to watch it happen. It’s like watching a car accident in slow motion. Nothing I do helps, and I can do all my work from here.” Another pause, filled in by the spitting of grease in the pan and Lena shifting on the couch, blankets crinkled up around her. “I don’t even think he knows I’m gone.”

As with most things, Lena turns out to be right barely four days later.

* * *

Lex Luthor kills over thirty people with a kryptonite bomb in a botched attempt to murder her cousin. It’s a tragedy, the place where it happens is licked green by the crystalline structures, kryptonite attempting to grow in bunches. The only reason why Clark couldn’t save them was because the kryptonite bomb, it seeded the area, made it grow from everything it touched. It was intended to hit Clark and then grow on him, entomb him in poisonous crystals that would sap his life away.

Instead, it clears out almost the entire 32nd floor of a high rise and leaves the place so irradiated by synthetic kryptonite that the two people who survive the initial blast die a few days later due to acute radiation poisoning. The first to die from a type of radiation scientists believed _did not affect humans_ in any meaningful capacity, as a result of them not having the type of cells the radiation interfered with most prominently. It was known to cause blindness, but never death, not like this.

It’s Kara’s turn to be with Lena, now. To be her pillar, and it’s... messy. Complicated. Lex damned himself to life in prison, not that the trial is set yet, and Lena will likely have to be the one to testify against him. His actions aren’t acceptable, not in any way, and he deserves justice.

It’s obviously ruining Lena to have to be the one to pull that trigger.

Kara’s not a physical person in most cases. Bad experiences with _being_ physical and her overall aversion towards certain types of actions make her keep her distance. The only person she really tolerates is Cyra, who clings to her like a burr on a wooly sock whenever the opportunity arises.

Somehow, she ends up with Lena’s tongue in her mouth - Cyra passed out in her bed not ten feet away - while Lena sobs quietly, openly, broken by grief but trying to find a way to soothe it. It never escalates, Lena respects her boundaries, doesn’t push, but the kissing is heated and there’s a lot of cuddling and just—

It gets complicated.

Very, very complicated.

* * *

Lena eventually has to leave. It was a nice fantasy, whispered between the two of them of just living in Kara’s place, not dealing with reality, but as with Cyra’s conception it wasn’t something they could actually pursue. Lena has to leave because without her the company defaults to her mother and the fewer words said about that woman the better.

It’s not just that, either. It’s the trial, rapidly approaching, which Lena will have to testify at. Lena, who was only allowed to remain out of police custody because half of the apartment had thought they were dating and Lena was living with her now, called them oh-so-domestic. Her airtight alibi means she couldn’t’ve been involved with Lex, not when she was helping to look after her girlfriend’s sick kid.

Which raises the other complication—neither Kara or Lena are sure of what exactly _they_ are. The relationship has no name, outside of maybe ‘grief-fuelled face sucking’, and it was good that way. Uncomplicated works best for both of them, but uncomplicated is not the name of the game for a Kryptonian _or_ a Luthor.

“...Are we girlfriends?” Kara finds herself asking, laying with Lena curled into her side, the last day she can stay.

Lena stills, takes in one of those long, careful breaths. Like she’s preparing herself for something.

Kara feels her stomach drop.

“Can we be?” Lena murmurs, whisper-quiet, always so careful for Cyra. Kara knows her daughter can sleep through shy of anything now that she’s got muted hearing again, but Lena mostly knows Cyra for her wailing outbursts of confusion in the middle of the night. “With... all of this?”

“If you want to be,” Kara whispers back, because it feels private.

Lena never responds.

She leaves the next day, and Kara has to watch her go with that long ache in her chest.

* * *

Time moves forward. Cyra graduates her first year of school with flying colours, Kara begins to slowly help Cyra wean off of her power dampeners, one-by-one, until she can handle them. They were never intended to be permanent, just around for long enough to get Cyra back on her feet and get her into a headspace to process what she was feeling. Lena left behind dozens of increasingly weaker strength versions of them all, all hand-crafted oh-so-carefully, with detailed write-ups on what to expect for Cyra, among other things.

It’s more than Kara thought Lena would actually do. It shows that she wasn’t just sticking around to do her work, she was helping Cyra. It makes her leaving harder.

She watches Lena’s activity like a hawk. She stays up late to watch the trial against Lex, watches Lena monotonously describe her brother’s downward spiral into insanity, watches her be the finishing blow to any chance Lex’s lawyers had at keeping him out of max security prison for life.

He’s sentenced for thirty life sentences, no chance at parole.

She watches Lena recollect the demolished Luthor Corp stocks, watches her piece everything back together with the same meticulous grace that she used to soothe Cyra and build her things. She watches her announce her plans to change the name to L-Corp, describing the decision to be due to the nature of her last name. She says she will bear her last name, she will carry it, but that L-Corp should not have to, that L-Corp can be a force for good.

Very few people believe her. They see another Luthor with the same silver tongue who gave up her brother. They see the girl who hid in National City as her brother killed someone. They see a pariah.

Kara just sees Lena, and she trusts Lena so, so much.

* * *

Clark rebounds from his brush with death easily and gets back to things two months after Lex’s initial arrest. They have a talk together, just one El to another, and it’s tense and terse but not bad. Clark is still reeling from Lex, but says he can give Lena some distance, let himself process what the world had come to before he makes any judgement.

Lois tells her Lena’s hot, which breaks the sombre, serious mood like a mallet against a glass vase.

There’s no falling plane, no erstwhile sister being caught up in something wrong. Kara doesn’t get the chance to follow in her cousin’s footsteps because there is no reason to. She might’ve dreamed of it, once, but... to a point, she doesn’t feel the need to. She is helping, as much as she can, with Cat and Cyra and everything else. She’s content where she is, with the occasional text from Lena that gets her heart fluttering.

She doesn’t fight, she just excels in what she does, as much as she can, as promised.

* * *

She sees Lena again after a year. It’s unexpected, Lena didn’t tell her beforehand, but one day Lena is still in Metropolis and still working at L-Corp to fix the future and whatever else and the next there’s new construction work on the highrise across from the CatCo building, clearly putting up ‘L-CORP’ in huge, sprawling white letters.

Cyra, at her side, gawps up at it identically to her. The wind is fair, the sun is high, Cyra and she had gone out to practice flying again, and to see how good her range was for picking up on music continents away. That had been a real mystery for her, Cyra belting jaunty tunes in eight different languages, reciting songs she didn’t understand but had overheard miles and miles and miles away, always getting stuck in her head.

Heels click-and-clack up behind her. Kara turns, Cyra does too.

Lena is standing there, and she’s different. Changed, like they all are by the passage of time. She’s older, clearly, with more lines under her eyes, her lips are no longer bare but licked by a bright red. Her eyes are shadowy, and her stance is colder, more detached than it was before. There’s a hardness to her, rough like calluses, built up from trial and tribulation and overcoming all of it despite the odds.

Her face softens, smooths into a cheeky smile. “I had hoped to send you a picture,” Lena mused, fiddling with her phone in one hand. On the screen were their texts, the last message from just a few hours ago. They talked a lot, but never _talked_ ; just mindless conversations meant to assure one another that they were still there.

That Kara was still waiting for her.

“Mama got me up early,” Cyra grunts, still obviously not impressed. “To do, _y’know_.”

Lena leans down a little, nodding sagely. “Did you have fun?”

Cyra _beams_ , just like her name, a smile she’d taken from Kara and made impossibly more impactful. She almost sees Lena wince under the intensity of it. “YEAH!” She belts out, because she’s 7 and hasn’t - and maybe _will never_ \- have a perfect gauge on her volume.

Lena reaches forwards, drags her fingers through Cyra’s hair to another burble of happy noises. “That’s good,” she muses, quietly, eyes lidded. Relaxed, like she was coming home.

Kara feels her heart clench a little, and almost as though she could hear it, Lena glances up.

“Welcome back,” Kara manages, feeling a bit of a croak in her throat, dampness around her eyes. It’s stupid, Lena and she had been a fling and comfort both and it shouldn’t matter that much. It shouldn’t.

Lena gets up, wraps her in a hug that smells like her and feels like her and even if she’s a little bonier than she was before, that’s fine too. Because Lena’s here, and she’ll have to yell at Sam later for not telling her.

Kara hugs her back.

“I’m home.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is very stream-of-consciousness, I'll give you that. I wrote this all in one sitting because I felt weirdly hormonal.
> 
> Anyhow, Cyra is pronounced SEE-RAH. And she also prefers if you pronounce it like you're speaking in all capitals (i.e: yelling, because she's Kara concentrate). 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
